We spoke in French, the Doctor and I.
His first words were to apologize.
To say they had found him guilty.
He had spent three years in prison.
Il y avait des expériences, experiments,
he said, ordered by his superiors.
Qu'est-ce qu'on pouvait faire?
What could he do? I had no answer.
—Nor did I ask for the particulars
of what he'd done. After all, it was
our first night, a cocktail ice breaker,
on a Mediterranean cruise, and only now,
do I imagine, forty years later, the splaying
open of skin, the meticulous peeling back
of its layers to shade a lamp in the quiet
leisure of my living room: slippers, pipe,
my well worn leather chair, its own skin now
crackling with age, and that good book I am
more than halfway through as I anticipate
the comforting justice of its ending.